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OverTheGeicoE writes "U.S. Senator Susan Collins, the top Republican on the homeland security committee, plans to introduce a bill that would require a new health study of the X-ray body scanners used to screen airline passengers nationwide. If the bill becomes law, TSA would be required to choose an 'independent laboratory' to measure the radiation emitted by a scanner currently in use at an airport checkpoint and use the data to produce a peer-reviewed study, to be submitted to Congress, based on its findings. The study would also evaluate the safety mechanisms on the machine and determine 'whether there are any biological signs of cellular damage caused by the scans.' Many Slashdotters are or have been involved in science. Is this a credible experimental protocol? Is it reasonable to expect an organization accused of jeopardizing the health and safety of hundreds of millions of air travelers to pick a truly unbiased lab? Would any lab chosen deliver a critical report and risk future funding? Should the public trust a study of radiology and human health designed by a US Senator whose highest degree is a bachelor's degree in government?"

our lawmakers and executive branch are in the pockets of large corporations. federal government buying tons of equipment increases shareholder value and provides certain benefits to those who greased the skids.

The immense foresight was they made money upon initial sale and now they'll make more money going back and making them more safe. If people continue to complain, they can rinse and repeat. The best part is if the minimize the changes, they can have minimal impact and minimal cost, so its highly profitable and more likely they'll need to circle back around for more safety measures at an even higher cost. Who wouldn't love this deal?

When I see "should of" or such similar alliteracy*, it says to me that whoever wrote it reads very little and is therefore probably not very well educated. What annoys me is when their lack of literacy makes it hard to parse; loose != lose, for example. Did you lose the dogs of war, or did you loose them? OTOH if I see "now" instead if "know" I assume that's just a typo, anybody can make typos no matter how intelligent or educated they are.

*No, I didn't mean illiteracy. To misquote Twain, an alliterate is no better off than an illiterate.

I prefer once more into/unto the breach. But loosing the dogs of war will do fine, thank you.

I try very hard not to judge people by their misuse of words, but to me there are some mistakes that instantly set my brain into "this person is 13 years old" mode.Namely when someone uses there instead of their (or less commonly their instead of they're).Now I should know better because I correct my wife's papers and she's got a fistful of degrees and still makes homonym errors galore, but the fact remains it makes you look less skilled.Here on/. it is harder to judge. Is the person young, English a second (or third or fourth) language, trolling for Grammar Nazi posts?Also,/. is somewhere between blog postings and IM convos, in the former I expect excellent grammar, while in the latter (and on/.) you can not correct errors once you've posted...

From personal experience (and I'm not a native English speaker myself), people who learned it as a foreign language tend to make such mistakes much less often. Perhaps this is because they learn grammar and morphology of the language while acquiring vocabulary. Also, it might have to do something with the fact that e.g. in my native language, the difference between "its" and "it's", or "their" and "they're" and "there", is so big there's no mistaking one for the other.

A few years ago, when I was studying in a university in New Zealand, an old British lady who lectured us on Ethics complained in a personal conversation with me about horrendous grammar and spelling she sees in essays written by local kids, compared to those by foreigners, especially Europeans. She specifically mentioned the correct use "its" vs "it's" as one of the things that stood out in contrast. Judging by how it progresses on the Net, it seems that it only gets worse with every new generation.

When I see "should of" or such similar alliteracy*, it says to me that whoever wrote it reads very little and is therefore probably not very well educated.

In this case, the similarity in the pronunciation of "have" and "of" - both have "v" sounds - is likely a factor. I could be slack writing or proofreading skills, but I refer to the visual/linguistic experiment loosely entitled, "Count the number of "F" characters." For example:
Count the number of F's in the following sentence. [yahoo.com]

You're on the right track. The "should of" abuse is largely a side effect of the way we learn English as a primary language. Native English speakers learn English first by speech (from their parents, from TV, whatever) before they learn to read.

The problem comes because so many speakers use the contracted form of "should have". The words "should've" and "should of" sound nearly identical unless you are deliberately exaggerating the latter. Therefore, by the time kids learn the correct spelling, "should have", they have been hearing "should've" and interpreting it as "should of" for many years. It is already ingrained in their vocabulary, and is thus hard to unlearn.

It's not "douchey" to want to converse using correct spelling and grammar. For one thing, it immediately tells you something about the person you are talking to. If they really can't be bothered to learn to write properly, what makes you think they have anything worth saying?

Everyone makes the odd grammar and spelling mistake, and more frequently the odd typo, but consistently poor spelling and grammar is just laziness. I correct my friends' spelling and grammar (politely), and I get the same in return when I make errors.

I can not tell a wise manBy the way he speaks or spells.But the care he takes in what he doesShows his care in what he tells.So I shall call a man a foolIf he doesn't care enough to make a poem without a massive non-sequitur.

Precision is important. If exchanging ideas is all that is important then why not simply grunt and point at what you want, for example.

It's not "small minded" to place importance on communication skills where going too far in the other direction is equally bad, and leads to atrocious constructions like "If you have any questions direct then ask myself" or non-words like "irregardless" in an attempt to sound important.

Obviously there are going to be people who use their ability to write correct English as a way to feel superior to someone else (that's human nature and happens in every situation where some people are better at a thing than other people (games, sports, literacy, art, music....), but that in itself is not a reason to say "screw the whole thing, you understood me!". (There are whole communities on the web who could argue about the punctuation at the end of that last sentence).

Like I said before; people make small slips here and there, but correcting them is not rude or anal or small minded (depending on the attitude of the corrector, or course). However, when an entire post is littered with repeated, basic errors then there are really very few excuses if someone says "I'm sorry, you need to work on that if you want me to take you seriously" - if that's the level of care and attention they put into communicating with other people, then what sort of care and attention do they pay to other things?

Because it's not pointless. I don't know if you're familiar with the concept of cognitive load, but it applies here. Put into terms that geeks can understand, we each have a finite amount of CPU power, and if we waste it on doing meaningless reinterpretation, then it isn't available to use for other things.

Yes, that irritated me too. There is an acceptable excuse, where English a second language of the writer; in which case he would likely welcome a correction. It seems that that is rarely the case. Most people think that it is their prerogative to write however they please and put the burden of deciphering their gibberish on the reader, rather than learn a few simple rules of grammar.

Relax, it's an election year. Susan is just trying to act like she really gives a shit to her constituents. They slamdunk this one through, it's damned good sound bytes on their re-election campaign ads: "We thought of the children!!" On Nov 7th, nobody will give a fuck anymore and this will just go away to be resurrected in 2014.

Isn't this something our fabulous leaders should of demanded before spending a crap load of money and deploying them all around the nation?

Isn't this something that's better late than never, considering that it's too late to say it should be done beforehand?

This. Politicians are not engineers. And even if they were, when they do something right, it makes more sense to praise them for it than it does to point out how foolish they may have been not to have done it earlier. Attacking them only makes sense if you are trying to defeat them in the next election--which is probably not the right thing to do when they do something right. =)

The point of complaining that it wasn't done in the first place is to emphasize that the people who put this into place are not qualified to make decisions of this magnitude and should be fired (or voted out).

No. The leaders should not have demanded that the TSA choose an independent laboratory. The leaders should have suggested that the FDA or the AMA or some similar, but unaffiliated to the TSA, agency choose the lab. The TSA may just farm it out to a "Technology/Science Assessors" lab for rubber-stamping.

Foes of... "virtual strip searches," had hoped that today's Senate hearing would lead to a privacy outcry on Capitol Hill.

Not quite. The hearing quickly cleaved along partisan lines, with Democratic senators applauding the Obama administration [for the xray machines] and Republicans offering only modest criticism.

"Mr. Pistole, you're doing a great job," Jay Rockefeller, a West Virginia Democrat and chairman of the Senate committee overseeing air travel, told TSA chief John Pistole... For emphasis, Rockefeller added a few minutes later: "I think you're doing a terrific job."

Sen. Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat, admitted right away that "I have been a fan of the advanced imaging technology." American air travelers, she said, "have to understand that this is being done for their best interests and their safety."

***

Sen. Claire McCaskill, a Missouri Democrat, suggested that the public outcry was a problem of education: if Americans learned more about the TSA's new procedures, they wouldn't object to the new searches.

It was pushed through by someone who owned part of the companies. He knew what he was doing in pushing to have these deployed.

As far as neutral third parties, there are plenty - it's just that the process *cannot* with honesty validate any of the devices being used in the field. Each one could be manufactured differently. They'd have to start back at the manufacturing process, and I don't think the gov't is ready for that part of the process. This is why when they tested just one and it sh

As someone who works in radiation safety for the government, I can tell you that studies on these scanners have been done. There is virtually no risk from the scanners. You get far more additional radiation from flying in the airplane than you do from the scanner. The risk from these scanners is not the unknown value.The unknown value is the benefit from the scanners. As far as I know, no study has ever shown that these scanners provide any benefit. Therefore even though risk is very small, benefit is even smaller, and the risk-benefit tradeoff is lopsided against the scanners.

Backscatter dosage effects are extrapolated, too -- toward zero. There isn't sufficient data on the carcinogenic effects of ionizing radiation at very low dosages. (It would be a difficult experiment, as the doses are well below that of natural radiation.) So in general they assume a linear-to-zero model because it's a good safe choice. (There's no reason to suspect that low doses would produce cancer at higher-than-linear rates. They could be less-than-linear, but it's good to assume the more conservative

Agree with you on the lack of benefits of the scanners. As far as the safety. As someone who works in radiation safety, can you elaborate some more. Conventional wisdom on radiation safety is that the dangers are cumulative, but that's clearly not really the case. Maybe for long term risks like cancer, but clearly in the short term, higher intensity is more dangerous. For an extreme example, consider em radiation in the 560 to 490 nm wavelengths. Exposure is, as far as anyone has ever studied, virtually harmless. An entire lifetime's exposure adds 0% to cancer risk as far as I know. However, take a person's average exposure over the course of a month and give it to them in a tenth of a second. The cancer risk is still 0%, but that's only because the person has just been utterly vaporized. Maybe try instead taking a person's exposure to those frequencies in full sunlight over their whole body and concentrate it for 30 seconds on just one square centimeter of their body. No instant death this time, but that square centimeter will be completely and permanently destroyed. Also, cancer risk from that is now no longer 0% because of all of the byproducts from the burn.

So, yes you get more radiation from the flight than you do from the body scanner. People forget that visible light is radiation too, of course. So, technically, you get far more radiation from the lights in the plane than you do from either of them. Radiation safety obviously has to take these things into account, and it gets technical. Maybe many of us here won't understand the deeper issues involved in a full technical explanation of the relative safety of the body scanners versus the flight. We're a pretty technical crowd, however, I'm pretty sure just about all of us can withstand a lot more detail than you gave. So, if it's your field, by all means educate us on _why_ the scanners are so safe.

1. The TSA is solely accountable for testing, calibrating, and maintaining these machines.2. An audit of the tests found that machines were mis-calibrated by up to a factor of 10 (misplaced decimal point), that the testing and calibration procedures were unclear, and that the technicians had inadequate training.3. TSOa are standing near these machines 8 hours per shift without wearing any protective clothing and they are prohibited from wearing dosimeters.4. That the studies that were performed have been contested because the methodology has not been shown to adequately account for the tact that 100% of the radiation dose of the back-scatter machines is deposited within 3mm of the skin.5. The type of radiation received while flying is different than the type of received from the scanners, so a direct comparison of levels is meaningless.

The type of radiation received while flying is different than the type of received from the scanners, so a direct comparison of levels is meaningless.

This is why we convert radiation dosage measures (which are directly measured in rad or something similar) into rem, which are adjusted for the effectiveness of the particular "type" of radiation in damaging a human.

The debate over airport "security" hasn't been rational for at least a decade. We haven't gotten anywhere with the American public using reason, so why not fight fear with fear? I'm not saying it's the best way, but it seems to be working for the other guys.

They did. It might have been insufficiently independent, depending on how much you buy into a Massive Government Conspiracy to pump a few million dollars into two companies and secretly irradiate you.

The general technology has been studied extensively. Third-party labs test the specific equipment used by the TSA. I think the most comprehensive reports are done by the U.S. Army Public Health Command and available on the TSA's website.

At least as important, in my opinion, is an independent study to determine whether the body scanners and other security changes are effective at reducing terrorism and other criminal activity. If they are not effective at their stated goal, then we should just get rid of them regardless of whether they are safe or not.

IMO, the *real* question we should be asking is why we believed this costly new technology, coupled with a whole new govt. agency to operate it, was going to accomplish anything substantial in the first place? The argument over the cost is tough to make without somebody insisting that either A) it created so many new jobs for American citizens that it added a lot of value, and/or B) if it saves even ONE human life, how can you put a price on that? So IMO, we can probably just ignore the "cost" angle, and simply ask if the TSA screening procedure we've implemented is a net positive, or a net negative for everyone?

Personally, I think you've got to be drinking some serious govt. kool-aid if you REALLY believe this nonsense of putting anyone on a secret "watch list" (based on the discretion of agents hired from the general public at hourly pay starting at around $11/hr.), and making everyone walk through body scanners before boarding commercial planes is going to save you from terrorist acts. As one of my friends pointed out, you can go to most airports in the U.S. and find that the only thing keeping you from wandering out to the hangars and runways is a chain-link fence around their perimeter. If someone REALLY wanted to sabotage a plane, they could throw on a mechanics' outfit or something, run out onto the tarmac, and do whatever they wanted to do with a parked jet, or even quickly insert something into some luggage on one of the transports, waiting to be loaded onto a flight. Trying to secure the plane from the terminal's boarding gate so heavily ignores all the other possibilities. Meanwhile, we've created a situation where EVERYONE is inconvenienced and put at risk of being falsely labeled a "potential terrorist" for transgressions as simple as wearing a t-shirt with a counter-culture political message printed on it, or making the wrong comment while standing in line.

As a public health measure, we specifically designed our scanners to operate 95% on faith beams and only 5% on ionizing radiation(the fact that this also allowed the sleazy contractor not-at-all-definitely-not connected to our former leader, who definitely isn't a lich [wikimedia.org] save on BOM costs was unconnected with this decision...)

If you allow skeptics to get near the machines, they'll jam the faith rays and force us to either face further terrorist attacks or turn up the radiation!

TSA must have gotten their marching orders recently. They have been pretty strict about pushing as many people through those radiation machines as possible for that last couple of months. Prior, you could pony up to the metal detectors without much hassle. Now, you are told to stand in the long imaging line. And this is the case at several airports I travel through.

TSA must have gotten their marching orders recently. They have been pretty strict about pushing as many people through those radiation machines as possible for that last couple of months. Prior, you could pony up to the metal detectors without much hassle. Now, you are told to stand in the long imaging line. And this is the case at several airports I travel through.

You know, you can still decline to go though the scanners. In recent months I have traveled through many busy airports. I watched as TSA agents push people (including myself) x-ray 'branding' line. No matter how busy (or how light) the travel loads have been, I have and always will opted out. Until they pass federal rules suggesting we no long have the right to opt out, I will be standing safely outside of the range of any body scanner for the foreseeable future.

In this country it's still legal not to do something if you feel uncomfortable. Get a pat down and move on with your travel day...

The problem is that opting out of the radiation dosing machines means opting into the government authorized groping line. And if you don't like that option, you are either kicked out of the airport (if you are a politician) or arrested for not cooperating with the TSA (for everyone else).

But at least all of these TSA measures have caught tons of terrorists right. *checks the Terrorists Caught By The TSA counter* *sees it reading zero* Oh, wait... Never mind.

I too always opt out of the body scanner - I'd rather have the temporary psychological stress of another guy putting his gloved hands on my thighs than permanent damage to my physical body from a machine that some "security company" lobbied to have placed in every airport in the U.S. under the guise that it miraculously makes us safer.

I wouldn't be surprised if the stress of dealing with the TSA and other privacy violations in a post-9/11 world has killed more people than terrorism ever did.

The problem is that opting out of the radiation dosing machines means opting into the government authorized groping line. And if you don't like that option, you are either kicked out of the airport (if you are a politician) or arrested for not cooperating with the TSA (for everyone else).

But at least all of these TSA measures have caught tons of terrorists right. *checks the Terrorists Caught By The TSA counter* *sees it reading zero* Oh, wait... Never mind.

Buddy, believe me, I know what you mean. I few months back I requested my pat-down before realizing I had *cough* morning wood. Lets just say that was the most uncomfortable/entertaining pat-down for the spectators standing in line for their x-ray scans. Poor me. Poor TSA agent...

1) The TSA keeps claiming we need these new and more intrusive security programs to catch terrorists. Yet, they haven't caught any.

2) There really isn't any way to test the deterrent claim. Yes, you could have some random airports reduce security on the line to pre-911 levels. (Don't announce it and rotate daily which airports have these security reductions.) Then, you could test which flights had more instances of terrorist attacks. However, if the deterrent of the enhanced security is true, it would apply to the dropped security lines as well since the terrorists wouldn't know ahead of time which airports to target. In short, it's untestable unless you announce the reduced security airports ahead of time and nobody would authorize that.

BTW, they might not have let terrorists get on board with a weapon, but there are plenty of instances of the TSA missing weapons. A quick Google search found an instance a couple of weeks ago of them missing a weapon in a carry-on bag. ( http://www.myfoxdfw.com/dpp/news/Plane-Left-Gate-With-Gun-on-Board-DFW-Airport-Says-011812#ixzz1jr0xQJdZ ) By the time they realized the issue, the woman was gone. She was apprehended 90 minutes later. What if this was a terrorist instead of a little old lady, though? I just don't see the reasoning behind removing shoes and ditching all liquid above X ounces (in the trash can, no less.... if it was an explosion risk, I wouldn't toss it there!!!) when they have trouble with simple things like guns.

The issue is whether the deterrent value of the additional screening justifies the billions of dollars spent on additional equipment, the noticeable reduction in personal privacy (Gee, I can subject myself to questionable radiation doses *AND* have some screener in the side room verify whether I was circumsized, OR I can have them manually check the size of my privates), etc etc.

Many in the field argue that the best improvements in air security have come from the deadbolts on the cockpit door and the attitude change of the passengers from sit-back-and-wait-to-be-ransomed (from the old Havana-hijacking days) to the take-them-down-before-they-get-us seen now.

The current checkpoint system is reactive: Richard Reid had explosives in his shoes, now we take off ours. One group had chemicals they *hoped* to combine on-board to create a bomb, so we have the War on Moisture (despite the evidence it would never have worked). The underwear bomber packed PETN in his BVDs, so now we have virtual strip-searching and groping of grandmothers, toddlers, and ostomy patients.

THEY'RE NOT GOING TO TRY THE SAME THING AGAIN, BECAUSE IT DIDN'T WORK THEN.

Profiling is the best solution (ref: El Al), but the government is too concerned with potential discrimination lawsuits to follow through.

The Ben Franklin quote is over-used but still all too applicable: Those who would trade temporary safety for essential liberty deserve neither.

Profiling is not the best solution. Not even close. It just means terrorists use non-terrorist-looking people to carry out their deeds, who are not exactly hard to come by. If you check the size of El Al's fleet and routes, and the actual content of their security procedures, you'd see that profiling of anything other than specific apparent characteristics is a complete waste of time.

Oh, and the actual quote says the opposite of your misquote: "Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety". Profiling is giving up essential liberty for just the feeling of temporary safety, which is even more morally repugnant.

I have and always will opted out. Until they pass federal rules suggesting we no long have the right to opt out, I will be standing safely outside of the range of any body scanner for the foreseeable future.

Have you had to travel with a laptop though? Last time I opted out, I had to wait next to the moving line for 5-7 minutes while they found a patter-down for me. At the same time my brand-new (out of the bag) laptop was sitting on the other side, somewhat outside of my view. It's a miracle no one st

Decline going through scanners? I decline going through airports. Air travel was bad enough before the TSA, I'd have to be in one hell of a hurry to take a commercial plane these days.

In this country it's still legal not to do something if you feel uncomfortable. Get a pat down and move on with your travel day...

What if you're uncomfortable with both? "Here son, you have a choice -- drink this vomit or eat this cow patty. It's a free country, you have choices!"

How about we get rid of the scanners, the patdowns, the metal detectors, and the TSA itself? None of those things have caught ONE SINGLE TERRORIST. However, the shoe bomber made it through security and was stopped by the passengers.

The TSA is a waste of time, money, and freedom. It should be abolished, and go to highway safety whare some lives actually WILL be saved.

I've done this about 15 times now and have yet to be pushed through one of these microwaves. It's amazing to see the others around you marvel at the fact that you do not HAVE to go through these things - most don't know. Sure, it takes more time and in one instance I had to let the TSA agent doing the search know that they skipped part of the procedure (I've done it THAT many times!) but it's not that bad and it's more thorough than the machine is anyway IMO. It annoys my travel companions that I do this and slow them down but oh well, I need more radiation like a hole in the head. Radiation is cumulative, the less the better for me given a choice...

I was thinking the same thing. Don't get me wrong, it's a step better than taking TSA's word for it, but I can see this turning into a "confidential" study and TSA stating this study will not be publicly availabe due to "national security" reasons UNLESS it states that the machines are safe, which therefore would be made available to the public. My bet is that this study will never make it to the public....

The TSA should not get to choose the agency, machines to be tested, nor the time for the tests. An independent lab should show up at an airport and test any machines they wish to test (one or few at a time to have little or no impact on passenger screening), including making the TSA stop using an in use machine (and switch to another) so it can be tested. They should test at least 100 machines at no less than 25 different airports, all randomly selected by the testing agency. All with no more than 1 hour notice to the TSA (preferably with less than 30 minutes notice or no notice). One viable way to do it "without notice" would be to show up, identify yourselves and immediately identify machines for testing. The TSA can spend 15-30 minutes verifying that they are indeed from the testing agency. In the mean-time, no one touches the machines to be tested. Any any use machines to be tested shall stop being used as soon as another machine can be made ready and passengers redirected to the other machine.

Can't we judge the experiment on its merits (good or bad)? What does the educational background of the person proposing it have to do with anything? The scientific method doesn't break just because someone without a PHD proposes the experiment.

Each state should be entitled to pick their own lab to conduct the study on the scanners. Yes, that means 50 independent studies by local labs. More if we go counting DC and other territories.

Also, should they find any negative effects; any citizen of the state that has been exposed to the scanners should be entitled to an exponential sum for each exposure (since any additional exposure would not just additively increase cancer risks.)

THAT would be a responsible law to go for. But who am I kidding, the TSA now controls too much money, enough to lobby its way into doing anything they want.

Well, to be fair, only about a third of Americans are Republicans (the only ones likely to "work hard" to make this person VP) and I would venture that less than 5% of them did any actual campaign work at all.

As for your latter observation (i.e., people caring)? Yeah, that's about right.

The single most significant missing component in all our security efforts is a cost analysis. Are we spending too much, too little, or about the right amount? Some say that measuring that is hard, and it is. But measurement is inherently approximation (there is no such thing as a ruler that is exactly twelve inches long). Once you accept that, it becomes much easier to measure lots of things (see also: How to Measure Anything).

Can we begin with a very rough boundary estimate? I think we can. Here's one I did in my head while driving through the desert recently:

I am willing to accept having two of my one thousand closest lifetime United States citizen acquaintances die in terrorist attacks. That is an acceptable risk level. If we can get there, I feel we have done all we need to do. By the same token, if we are spending any significant amount of money to go beyond that level, I am less supportive. I don't think it is worthwhile to catch every terrorist any more than it is worthwhile to catch every speeder or jaywalker. Two in one thousand, lifetime, sounds like about the right number.

OK, so, how does that work out as an annualized US death toll? (please note: I did this in my head, and am mostly just regurgitating it here -- please correct me if the math is off)

I think we should be trying to stay under 6,000 United States citizens dying from terrorism every year. It is the acceptable rate, to me, in terms of the risk of my acquaintances dying. Any significant spending we do to get under that number is -- to me -- emotionalism, not rationalism. Given we haven't reached 6,000 in the past 20 years, I suspect we are spending too much.

I think they're definitely overfunded and way too full of themselves, but something is necessary, perhaps just trimmed down.

Where do you derive that conclusion? It's been over 10 years since Sept-11th. In order to justify their necessity, I want TSA to produce one credible threat that they have averted. Naturally I expect that they would be touting any success they had, so I have to assume they've got nothing.
Ergo, it isn't clear to me that "something" is necessary. Unless by "something" you mean regu

Unless your wife flies multiple times a week or lives/works in a likely "use a passenger plane as a missile" target then it would be much better (in a purely selfish existance) to not spend it on the TSA. Instead spend it on medical research, or road safety, or funding medical checkups, or any of thousands of other things that are far more likely to save their life.

Even if you do fly every day and spend all the time you aren't flying in a famous sky scraper you'd still be better off seeing the money spent on preventing the other things that are orders of magnitude more likely to shorten your life/reduce your quality of life.

So no the premise isn't wrong. By spending the money on that you are deciding not to spend it on something else. And that something else is *far* more likely to "save your life".

But I have to ask why the OP decided to belittle the Senator's formal educational credentials? This seems like a distraction for the real question here: are these full body scanners actually safe, and, that's the question the Senator has introduced to be studied.

The Senator has asked a good question here. I praise her for asking a question in a time when the knee jerk response has been a resounding YES to police state control. The OP has held up a straw man in questioning her education.

I think it's unfair to dismiss a suggestion by a member of Congress just because their educational and experience background doesn't match up with every possible legislative issue that could possibly cross their desk. This is why Congressmen have staffs with more diverse educational backgrounds, and I'm 99% certain that whatever he proposes is going to have been written by one of his staffers. Of course, if you're a cynic, then it was written by a lobbyist, vetted by a staffer then proposed by the Representative from Maine, but hey, I don't think what he's proposing is all that unreasonable.

If it were a democratic senator proposing the same, the submitter would have praised it as forward-looking and thoughtful, defending the people's right to know what they're being exposed to.

The submitter, and the editor who approved and posted it, are leftist hacks, and are using any platform they can get to belittle republicans. This is because they are so cock-sure of their position that this sort of behavoir seems legitimate.

Unfortunately, they pushed it a little too far this time, as their blind partisa

Letting the TSA pick an organization to do this is ridiculous, the GAO should be the one in charge of figuring out if this is harmful. You need a completely unbiased third party, not the guys who fouled up the "evaluation" in the first place.

Probably not, but I would say it depends on the details of how the study will be performed and interpreted: i.e. there can be a perpetual debate as to whether what we see actually 'is' cellular damage, or 15 more years are needed for verification --see the fudge factors on those never-ending ever-inconclusive cellphone tower 'studies' and the whole 'carbon neutral' and 'global warming' hype. And see how little consequence they have had (excluding "green" marketing) because all humans need to move around and

You can't tell from a press release if what they are planning to do is credible, but the basic outline is, and long overdue. There are certainly enough labs who do, e.g., medical or nuclear power radiology who would not be tied to the TSA's purse strings, so finding an independent lab shouldn't be hard if they want to.

If I was running this study, I would know is going to get attacked every-which-way, so I would do my best to makesure it was credible. Anything less would be a waste of time. But, maybe that's just me.

We already have a government agency tasked with evaluating workplace hazards. It doen't need to be independent of government itself. Just TSA. Inter-agency conflict can be useful here, in that OSHA might be happy to bust TSA for radiating their employees.

Also, the issue we should be worried about is not whether the claimed dose is dangerous. The more urgent issue is whether these things, as deployed, are dosing people at the correct level, which is easy to evaluate, and no one currently is doing so.

OSHA would be in charge of evaluating the safety of the machines from the perspective of the TSA and other airline/airport workers. Other agencies, like the FDA, are responsible for the safety to passengers.

There's so much focus on the passenger safety, though, that danger to the workers is the more likely problem, particularly because of how often and how long they are in proximity of the machines.

And yes, it's likely that OSHA would have no qualms about busting them for poor workplace safety.

The more urgent issue is whether these things, as deployed, are dosing people at the correct level, which is easy to evaluate, and no one currently is doing so.

(1) Experiment design. The senator won't "design" the study. I don't know how you got such a stupid idea. The senator is requesting (demanding, commissioning) the study. The bill is her effort to pin down what questions the study should answer. It's a darn sight better than just handing the scanner over to some folks and saying, "Take a look at this here doohickey and tell me what you think." She isn't going to come up with any actual science processes.

Think of it in programming terms - the senator is the boss, and she tells the programmer (scientist) what the program (science study) is supposed to output (what question the study is supposed to answer). She doesn't tell the programmer how to write the program, step-by-step. If, against all odds, she does stand there and try to tell you how to code each detail, you politely get her requirements again and shoo her off to do her actual job instead of yours (or you turn down the project). Nothing fancy to get so upset about, and a darn sight better than doing nothing and hoping for the best.

(2) Picking an unbiased lab. Of course the TSA will try to pick someone who will give them the results they want. The question is, how many labs (or scientists) do you think the TSA can influence? The TSA is not in the science business or the nuclear business or the detector business. They are in the business of training people with the IQs of dogs to bark when they see something gun-shaped and to sniff your crotch for dangerous materials.

In this I can at least claim some level of insider knowledge. I am a grad student at a nuclear physics lab. Nobody here has any special regard for the TSA - not the director, not the scientists, not the grad students. Now, we certainly aren't immune from political pressures, but in the end, no one is. However, most of the scientists here would rather be at odds with the TSA than have their professional reputation ruined by certifying a device as safe that can be demonstrated to be dangerous. Professional reputation is everything in science. If the TSA gets pissy at a scientist, then that scientist can go work in Germany, or France, or Great Britain, or India, or the various Arab countries with an interest in nuclear physics. If the scientific community gets angry at a scientist for endorsing something that kills folks, then there is nowhere in the world that the scientist can hide his damaged reputation.

(3) Lab funding. Labs are funded on fairly long cycles. Ours is funded on a five year cycle. So, any lab like ours would be fairly immune to a temporary temper tantrum by some government official. We're not completely immune, but our funding is mostly determined by the President's office, the DOE, and the NSF. Note how there is no mention of the TSA in there. The TSA doesn't fund a darned thing in science, and so we couldn't care less about offending the TSA. As I said, we aren't completely immune from political pressures - if a senator got really angry at us over such a thing, the study might be squelched and our funding might get reduced or cut. That's very uncommon, though. Usually, senators don't want their name next to a study that erroneously says something is safe if it actually kills people. It's bad for the senator's re-election efforts. It's especially bad if the word "nuclear" is involved anywhere - nothing scares the public (and thus, the politicians) like the word "nuclear."

(4) My professional opinion: You've completely got the wrong take on this. You probably didn't read the article at all. If anything, Collins is trying to use politics to squelch the scanners, not to cover up defects in the scanner's design. If there is any political pressure on the scientists involved in this study, it will be pressure to declare the devices unsafe and unsuitable for use. And, while I don't agree with playing politics with science, I do agree with squelching these scanners.

Should the public trust a study of radiology and human health designed by a US Senator whose highest degree is a bachelor's degree in government?

No, but it doesn't seem like she's designing the study. I suppose the text of the proposed bill would be relevant here. (Perhaps the poster was simply avoiding hypocracy here -- just as it's reasonable for someone with no real scientific background to commission a study, it's reasonable for someone with little understanding of the Internet to draft regulations for it. The latter doesn't seem to be a popular opinion, though. What matters, of course, is the extent to which they use information from experts to guide their decisions.)

Is it reasonable to expect an organization accused of jeopardizing the health and safety of hundreds of millions of air travelers to pick a truly unbiased lab?

Yes. As people like to point out, accusation is not conviction and people (and agencies) can be accused of just about anything. Provided that it's publicly-known what independent lab they pick -- which has been the case for previous studies -- it's easy enough for others to evaluate whether they're unbiased. That's not to say it will necessarily satisfy all critics -- there are many people who will claim that the chosen lab is biased, regardless of what lab is chosen.

Is this a credible experimental protocol?

I don't see an experimental protocol described. I do see an intent to commission a third-party study, which is common and quite credible. The only part that's questionable is determining "whether there are any biological signs of cellular damage caused by the scans." For one, "any" isn't necessarily a good safety cutoff, particularly if you're not being specific about what kind of cellular damage. For another, with the power that's used, you're well into the very-rare-event range for carcinogenic effects. You shouldn't anticipate scanning a test piece of flesh and looking for signs of cellular damage -- it would be easy to get a false negative. This is a part (admittedly, probably a small part) of why the health effects are disputed. At these power levels, you have to measure the dosing and then use a mathematical model to estimate the probability of causing cancer. It's easy to dispute the details of such models. (Is cancer incidence from ionizing radiation really linear and independent of other sources all the way to zero? Does weighting toward skin deposition matter?)

Would any lab chosen deliver a critical report and risk future funding?

Funding from whom? The TSA? Apparently they're not getting business from them now, so that seems like a pretty reasonable risk to take. Plenty of labs aren't government-funded. Even for those that are, releasing a report that's negative about one government organization only risks funding from a completely different organization if you assume some Massive Government Conspiracy. The NIH won't deny your grant because you discovered that backscatter machines really aren't safe.

Let's count how many times per year a person in an area represented by a member of congress goes through one of these machines. Then, for each of these occasions, let's have the congressman also go through it. So, if, for example, we calculate that people in a representative's district will go through one of these 10,000 times in 2012, let's have that congressman be subject to this radiation 10,000 times.

We can have it do it while the congressman sleeps and position them where a congressman often walks, such as outside their bedroom door, so it will not present any inconvenience to our representatives. We can also increase the radiation by a multiple to decrease the number of times they need to be radiated, further decreasing the time they need to sleep or walk through one of these machines.

Of course, we can make sure that only people within that congressman's district can view the images, because we want to respect his/her privacy.

...before there was a cancer cluster amongst TSA workers in Boston, and before the frequently flying public was exposed to that much danger. Yes, it's good that it's being looked at now, but it was absolutely irresponsible to deploy these in the first place.

I just flew out of PWM this weekend. I saw the new EHF scanner but didn't see it in use at all. I wouldn't be shocked if they never even turn the thing on at PWM. I'm also much more okay with the millimeter wave machines than x-ray backscatter. Non-ionizing radiation, but I would like to see a proper study on the effects of whatever dose of EHF that emits on people.

Except that most airports have officially closed the metal detector lines, except when the backup is too great. I travel only occasionally, and have seen the body scanner used more and more over the last few months. I went from only having to opt out once every blue moon, to having to opt out almost every time I travel. And the sad thing is that there are plenty of airports without body scanners at all. SFO, for example, has no body scanners in terminal 3. Norfolk has no body scanner at all. If you w